As the Internet expands, the importance and profitability of advertising has, in turn, increased proportionally. Originally, the methods of advertising on the Internet attempted to mimic that of traditional methods of advertising: the pop up ad, the banner ad, etc. But slowly, more sophisticated forms of advertising emerged such as interactive ads, Flash ads and video advertisements. These new forms of advertising focused on user interaction to generate greater revenues than that of traditional advertising methods; they tempted a user to participate in a manner other than simply clicking an ad and being sent to a landing page.
The current state of the art utilizes a plethora of interactive advertisements, ranging from simply interactive advertisements to highly complex advertisements such as Flash-based theme games. Additionally, injecting advertisements into existing content has begun to emerge as a lucrative source of advertisement revenue. For example, current video on a video sharing site may display a small banner ad on the video itself while the user views the selected video. Some advertisement schemes take this idea further and generate banner ads based on the video content itself, taking the old idea of targeted advertisement and applying it to a new medium.
However, in the current state of the art, advertisements are generally obtrusive or not fully integrated with the content itself. Thus, there exists a need in the art for a system and method for integrating interactive elements with existing video to create a new form of Internet media that seamlessly blends interactivity, advertising and content.